Hunting Gargoyles and Other Architectural Treasures

“You, son, are going to learn to look up,” says a man with a passion for architectural sculpture in John Freeman Gill’s new novel, “The Gargoyle Hunters” (Alfred A. Knopf). “You are not going to be another one of those blinkered goddamn New Yorkers who walk around town staring at their shoes.”

Set in the 1970s, “The Gargoyle Hunters” is narrated by Griffin, 13, who is coping with warring parents in a city coming apart at the seams. Recruited by his father to save the whimsical stone carvings and terra-cotta castings on old buildings about to be demolished, he is put to harsh tests of loyalty, even by teenage standards. Mr. Gill, who grew up in the East 89th Street townhouse that Griffin occupies (“something of a grandly tricked-out imp, just 12 feet wide”), spoke about this curious form of preservation and where to spot a good gargoyle today. (This interview has been condensed and edited.)

This book is loaded with architectural details, like how immigrant carvers immortalized their wives and pals in stone. But it’s also stuffed with 1970s cultural references. Did you mean to make baby boomers weep with nostalgia?

This ended up being a period novel, but it didn’t begin that way. I started with the sort of ruefully amused voice of Griffin, and the predicament he finds himself in, in the aftermath of a difficult divorce. The narrative takes place in 1974 to ’75, when the city was near defaulting. Everything that wasn’t nailed down was being stolen. There were urns stolen from the Grand Army Plaza arch in Brooklyn that were later discovered at a belt-buckle factory. The climax of my book was built around a true-life event: In 1974, a cast-iron building facade that was under the protection of the city Landmarks Preservation Commission was stolen, cornice to curb. The circumstances are a bit complex, but who stole it and exactly what happened to it are, to this day, unknown. I wanted to know the end of that story, so I sat down and wrote it.

How much does your early life in a Manhattan brownstone resemble Griffin’s?

The characters are invented, but the sort of rollicking strangeness of this family of artists is a reflection of my own childhood. Several years ago, I wrote a personal essay about it. When it was published, one of my mother’s boyfriends from that period, a Wall Street Journal editor, contacted me and said how uncannily I had captured his own sense of that house at that time. He said that it was like Monty Python meets the Bloomsbury group, with all of us rattling around together. My parents did get divorced while they were living in that house, and my father did become my mother’s landlord, and she did begin taking in oddball boarders to make ends meet.

Were there really gargoyle hunters?

The title of the book is taken from a 1962 New York Herald Tribune story called “Gargoyle Hunting in New York.” And actually my mother was a sometime gargoyle hunter. She would salvage snarling gargoyle keystones from demolition sites and take them home in my sister Tracy’s stroller after kicking Tracy out. The most famous gargoyle hunter was the art dealer Ivan Karp. In the 1950s, he and a band of other folks — they called themselves rubble-rousers — rescued all the architectural treasures they could find from demolition sites all over town. In my book, the characters are embarking on a much more morally questionable crusade.

Where are the best places in New York to see gargoyles?

I spot new ones all the time when I wander around Park Slope. There’s a lot on the Upper West Side around the 80s, from Broadway to Columbus. Manhattan Avenue and the surrounding side streets are teeming with sculptures. And the one Louis Sullivan building in New York — the Bayard-Condict Building, at 65 Bleecker Street — has a remarkable collection. Susan Tunick, a terra-cotta authority, told me that when the building was being restored, she was allowed to go out on a scaffold. She looked up and saw this colossal bosom looming over her.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page RE10 of the New York edition with the headline: Hunting Gargoyles and Other Architectural Treasures. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe